


The Rigors of Flight

by MrsCaulfield



Series: Full Boyfriend Experience [4]
Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Human, Aziraphale is a cute science nerd, Crowley is very proud to be dating a cute science nerd, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, Human AU, M/M, bc of course he is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:15:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28289049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MrsCaulfield/pseuds/MrsCaulfield
Summary: Crowley was raking his fork into his own dish, tearing into the flesh to extract one of the bones and proudly showing it to him. "I got a wishbone!"Confused, Aziraphale blinked and leaned closer to inspect it. A thin bone with two prongs stood aside Crowley's plate, and he pursed his lips. "A what?""Don't tell me you don't know what a wishbone is.""That, my dear, is called a furcula."*Short fluff thing set within the events of Free Trial Boyfriend
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: Full Boyfriend Experience [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2013088
Comments: 31
Kudos: 155
Collections: Good Omens Human AUs





	The Rigors of Flight

**Author's Note:**

> I'm back with another FTB installment! A short fluff thing that I've been meaning to write but I got a terrible case of writer's anxiety for the past 2 weeks, and smashing this out in one go earlier today helped me break it. So I hope you enjoy it and happy christmas eve!
> 
> **Important note** The first scene for this fic is set sometime between chapters 5 and 6 of Free Trial Boyfriend (shortly before the pool rescue). If you don't wanna refresh yourself on that, basically Crowley hasn't confessed his feelings yet, and Aziraphale is still struggling haha

Aziraphale had never been one of the popular kids in school, but that didn't necessarily mean that he'd had a terrible experience. It was... perfectly tolerable for the most part. Those coming-of-age films sure loved to dramatize the plight of the nerdy flamboyant kid, but people had never been particularly cruel to him. At most, they just thought he was a bit weird, but he never really gave it much thought, far too engrossed in the dog-eared paperbacks he would read from under his desk during history class. 

It was quite unusual to reflect on how much he hated that class, considering his current area of study.

So it was all well and good that he got through the basic educational system intact and (though he'd be the last person to describe himself as an Emma Woodhouse) _with very little to distress or vex him_. He did have friends too. Just a few, but they were nice. People who occasionally asked for his opinion on books or invited him into study groups and laughed at his little oddities with no malice. He was grateful to them as well, they certainly made his mundane school days more colorful. The thing was, though, upon graduation, it was an unspoken agreement that none of them would continue the acquaintance. 

And again, that was fine. Friends, even the nice ones, surely came and went when they wanted. There were some friendships that lasted, but in the grand scheme of things, a vast majority of them were always meant to be ephemeral. Where people left, new ones would come to take their place. Nothing to make an outrageous fuss about.

Aziraphale did have friends. Friends that he hung out with, laughed around with, argued and shared stories with. Still, he had never had a friend whom he wished would stay.

Ephemerality was the gist of most friendships. Even some of the world’s most bountiful lakes exhibited the phenomenon, and it was no surprise that sometimes, people did too.

But that was before he'd met Crowley.

Crowley appeared in his life like a meteorite - something space-y and profound that had been orbiting for quite some time, only to come crashing down one day and change the course of his life. All right, maybe it wasn't anything near that dramatic, but it certainly was close. Suddenly, he had another friend to hang out and laugh and argue and share stories with, only this time the thought that there was an end to it somewhere in sight filled him with dread.

But he didn't know how to handle any of these feelings. Crowley was his friend, but he'd also never been friends with anyone who was so deeply involved in his affairs and interests, who took to listening to each of his worries and made the dark days somewhat brighter. He'd never had a friend who would catch his eye from a distance, shoot him a smile, and send his heart thumping wildly in his chest. Indeed, it was different from anything he'd experienced before.

What he did know, though, was that he had something _good_ in Crowley, and he would endeavour to keep it going for however long it could go on.

On no account did he have any reason to think these things while crouched on the floor of his living room late at night, squinting over his notes. Beside him, Crowley was opening up their takeaway dinner over the coffee table. There were more important things to be concerned about, such as the never ending cycle of fretting over his studies and fretting over his job. 

Crowley passed him his portion of their humble chicken rice dinner. Aziraphale took it without comment, slicing into the meat and taking in bites without really tasting them much. His eyes were preoccupied with text blocks telling the riveting tale of the Ophidian proliferation sometime during the middle Jurassic*.

"Ah. Angel, look!"

Aziraphale turned to his friend, brows raised, startling slightly at the sudden exclamation. Crowley was raking his fork into his own dish, tearing into the flesh to extract one of the bones and proudly showing it to him. "I got a wishbone!"

Confused, Aziraphale blinked and leaned closer to inspect it. A thin bone with two prongs stood aside Crowley's plate, and he pursed his lips. "A what?"

"Don't tell me you don't know what a wishbone is."

"That, my dear, is called a _furcula."_

It was now Crowley's turn to give him a blank stare. "No, no. This is a wishbone. Everybody knows it's called a wishbone. People make wishes on it, _hence the name."_

In response, Aziraphale pointed a forefinger at the debated object and firmed his tone. "It is a furcula. A feature which evolved to prevent a bird's ribcage from caving in when the wings are out, to withstand the rigors of flight."

Crowley was silent for a couple of seconds, processing this. He chuckled breathily.

"Right. Bad day to find myself in an argument with a paleontologist about bones."

A flicker of guilt passed through him at Crowley's response. He hadn't meant to, but he'd been told before that he had the tendency to come off as arrogant when he talked about his passions.

Crowley seemed to take it in stride, at least, but that was only because he rarely let anything get to him. Aziraphale turned away from his notes, pulling his knees up to his chest to look at Crowley.

"What is a _wishbone?"_

Crowley picked up the furcula with his long fingers and held it up between them. 

"Here," he said, making Aziraphale go cross-eyed to keep looking at it. "Two people take one end each and then make a wish. They pull it apart and whoever gets the bigger piece gets their wish to come true."

Aziraphale held onto one end of the bone, giving it a determined stare. "Let's do it."

Crowley grinned wickedly. "That's the spirit. Close your eyes."

They both did so, and Aziraphale scrambled to make a wish, but in this fleeting moment he couldn't come up with many things he wanted to wish for. Beside him, he felt Crowley shift his sitting position, stretching out his long legs from an uncomfortable bend, and in the process his shoulder bumped into Aziraphale's side, radiating a flurry of warmth and sending a light shiver down his spine.

_I wish for Crowley and I to always be friends._

He opened his eyes, finding Crowley's face mere inches away from his, faint freckles dotting his nose and cheeks, raised with a handsome, friendly smile.

"Ready?" He asked. Aziraphale nodded.

They pulled.

"Yes!" Crowley gasped, holding up his larger piece with a triumphant fist. "Tough luck, angel. But s'alright, there's always next time."

Aziraphale gave him a shaky smile, setting his piece back on the plate as he tried to tamp down the dreary tails of disappointment, slowly flickering from the pit of his stomach. 

It was such a trivial thing to be upset about, but suddenly he wasn't hungry anymore.

"Hey, you alright?" Crowley asked, suddenly serious. "It's just a silly tradition."

Aziraphale nodded quickly. "Yes. Jolly good. Congratulations, dear. It's just, you must be so used to winning by now."

Crowley's victorious smile flickered and settled into something more withdrawn. His free hand began to pick at some loose threads of the carpet edge as he averted Aziraphale's gaze.

"Not really as much as you'd think, angel."

  
  


* * *

_(Present day...)_

Crowley used to be an athlete, for crying out loud. He still had the medals to prove it. Why was it taking all of his respiratory efforts to haul a single cardboard box into the corner of this living room?

Groaning, he tore off the packaging tape and opened the flaps to be greeted by the sight of... a pile of _rocks._

Well, that explained it.

But upon closer inspection, they weren't _just_ rocks. He realized this as he took out the specimens one by one, some larger than others, but all with certain dark imprints or casts of noteworthy patterns. 

He took a few of them in his hands, setting them on the bookshelf to be displayed among an array of well-loved books. There were two casts of trilobites which he set down next to a fist-sized polished coil of an ammonite sample.

Because you didn't really get through three years of dating a paleontologist without picking up a truckload of obscure knowledge by sheer osmosis.

"Oh! I see you've got my fossil collection."

Crowley turned to face his boyfriend with a proud grin. "I've laid some of them out. The prettier ones, at least. Figured you'd want them on display with your books."

Aziraphale shot him a grateful smile, his eyes setting alight with wonder, a sight that still took his breath away even after all these years. 

He was still very much like that ethereal being he had been lucky enough to catch sight of in anthropology.

Aziraphale stepped over to his side, assessing his work with a disapproving frown.

"What?"

"Why did you put them all next to each other? It looks wrong."

"Are you encouraging species segregation? I didn't want the ammonite to be lonely. It needed friends."

"You could have put it in with the other ammonites. This particular specimen is at least middle Cretaceous, and the trilobites all but went extinct during the Triassic. They aren't _friends._ They would never have coexisted.”

"Hm."

Crowley began to pluck off the two trilobites and moved them into the shelving below. (If he'd put them in the one above, Aziraphale would've complained that the older species should be placed below, and he'd rather avoid all that right now.)

"All this fancy talk and you didn't even know what a wishbone was," he grumbled lightly.

Aziraphale stiffened, seeming to recall the memory with great clarity. He waited for Crowley to set the trilobites back to right before speaking.

"About that incident... what exactly did you wish for that day? I never got to find out."

Crowley racked his brains. He didn't expect to be asked that question today. He shrugged. 

"Well, truth be told, I couldn't really think of anything at the time. So I just wished you'd get what you wished for."

He straightened back up and admired his work on the shelf, balancing out the distances between the fossils and the books and only lately registering that Aziraphale had gone silent.

He turned to look at him, and he was staring right at Crowley, his eyes glistening.

"You wished for _my_ wish to come true?"

"Well, yeah. Knowing you, couldn't have been all that hard. A pretty rock. Nifty bowtie. Sappy book with a classic happy ending. You're fairly easy to please, and you always have this way of getting what you want, even without all that tradition stuff. Why, did your wish actually come true?"

Crowley was starting to get unsettled by his eerie silence, but then the blond reached over and took his hand, threading their fingers and squeezing affectionately.

"Yes. As a matter of fact, it did."

Though still a little confused, Crowley answered with a smile of his own. As long as his angel was happy, there didn't seem to be anything to worry about.

Tugging on Aziraphale's hand, he turned them both around to look at the rest of the partially furnished room. Their new home.

"Well, I'd say there's still a ton of stuff to unpack, but we did it. We're moved in, angel."

Aziraphale laughed beautifully. It rang through and filled the whole place with a pleasing and happy air, drawing out more of the already ridiculous amounts of love that Crowley felt for him.

Aziraphale leaned into his side, gently nosing into his shoulder.

"Welcome to our new home, dearest."

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> _*Ophidia (Pan-Serpentes) is a reptilian sub-order from which modern day snakes evolved_
> 
> Where else am I gonna use my 2 semesters worth of paleontology stock knowledge if not for soft gay fanfiction haha 
> 
> I leave it to you to decide whether this means that angels and demons, as winged creatures, also possess a furcula, because that is a thing that's been bugging me ever since the show first came out skskdjf
> 
> Thank you for reading! <3


End file.
